“Now, one day a young man named Monsieur de Gradelle, who had been invited for the shooting, eloped with the young girl.

“Monsieur de Santeze remained calm as if nothing had happened, but one morning he was found hanging in the kennels, among his dogs.

“His son died in the same manner in a hotel in Paris during a journey which he made there in 1841, after being deceived by a singer from the opera.

“He left a twelve-year-old child and a widow, my mother’s sister.  She came to my father’s house with the boy, while we were living at Bertillon.  I was then seventeen.

“You have no idea how wonderful and precocious this Santeze child was.  One might have thought that all the tenderness and exaltation of the whole race had been stored up in this last one.  He was always dreaming and walking about alone in a great alley of elms leading from the chateau to the forest.  I watched from my window this sentimental boy, who walked with thoughtful steps, his hands behind his back, his head bent, and at times stopping to raise his eyes as if he could see and understand things that were not comprehensible at his age.

“Often, after dinner on clear evenings, he would say to me:  ’Let us go outside and dream, cousin.’  And we would go outside together in the park.  He would stop quickly before a clearing where the white vapor of the moon lights the woods, and he would press my hand, saying:  ’Look! look! but you don’t understand me; I feel it.  If you understood me, we should be happy.  One must love to know!  I would laugh and then kiss this child, who loved me madly.

“Often, after dinner, he would sit on my mother’s knees.  ‘Come, auntie,’ he would say, ‘tell me some love-stories.’  And my mother, as a joke, would tell him all the old legends of the family, all the passionate adventures of his forefathers, for thousands of them were current, some true and some false.  It was their reputation for love and gallantry which was the ruin of every one of these-men; they gloried in it and then thought that they had to live up to the renown of their house.

“The little fellow became exalted by these tender or terrible stories, and at times he would clap his hands, crying:  ’I, too, I, too, know how to love, better than all of them!’

“Then, he began to court me in a timid and tender manner, at which every one laughed, it was, so amusing.  Every morning I had some flowers picked by him, and every evening before going to his room he would kiss my hand and murmur:  ‘I love you!’

“I was guilty, very guilty, and I grieved continually about it, and I have been doing penance all my life; I have remained an old maid—­or, rather, I have lived as a widowed fiancee, his widow.